Yesterday I decided to upgrade my Shaw 50mb line to Shaw’s 150mb service on a 2 year plan lowering my cost by $30/month for the 2 year trial period. A changeover in modem/routers always entails a whole evening of planned methodical port remaps, cloud reboots, computer ips reassignments and so forth. So it was with a heavy heart anticipating the large amount of work that awaits me, that I pulled the plug on the Shaw modem/router and packed it up for an exchange at the Shaw store.
I walked around my apartment expecting blinking red cloud lights, woken apple tv searching for its mother apple store, the PC would always try to upgrade itself whenever it notices that it doesn’t have internet and of course my iPhone would have no service since it uses wifi calling, but surprisingly none of this happened. The clouds remained sleeping slowly blinking its dark blue lights, the Apple TV remained off (two of them in fact), the Mac Mini stayed sleeping and my iPhone simply reverted back to LTE even though wifi was still up, just no internet. Interesting I thought…
Went out to exchange my modem/router and came back with my new cardboard boxed high speed modem/router and plugged it in. Turned on my Macbook and went “Ahaaa, see no internet!!” then I noticed that in my hurry to justified the impending work ahead of me, I did not plug in the cable to the cable modem, which I did…
and everything was still quiet. I heard no rebooting PC’s, nor rebooting Clouds.
Went back to my MacBook and there without a hiccup was the internet. Mapped my Clouds and the clouds (not on static ip, but still using the dynamic ip that was assigned by the other modem/router) worked straight away.
Accessed the cloud through the cloud app and the Cloud immediately added the port mappings to my new router and got remote cloud access right away without a single glitch.
All my iphone/ipads/Apple TV just worked since my wifi is through my AC Wifi router that is used as an access point now so no wifi needed to b e assigned.
Everything in my house continued to work as though the modem/router was never offline.
The only thing that I needed to assign was the port mapping for my Mac Remote Desktop.
Half a year ago when a single Shaw outage would disrupt my whole home network. I would be watching a movie from my local network and suddenly my cloud would disappear. Or whenever Shaw loses its DNS and it happened regularly, it would lock my whole network making me think that there was a problem with my Cloud; this was because my computer DNS was set to a different set of DNS than my Clouds. The internet said to use Google DNS for your computer and your browser would be faster. I had many problems that I would attribute it to WD, but then I realize that there was another common enemy for all my peripherals and that was the Shaw Modem/router. Pulling the plug on my Shaw modem/router would cause everyone on my network to stop what they were doing and say “hey, where did everyone go?” and promptly stopped working and that was because everyone was connected together on the Shaw modem/router.
So I made that one change that should have been done a long time ago, I put everyone on a single 8-port Dlink Switch, with only one ethernet cord connecting the switch to the modem/router.
Thus pulling the plug on the modem/router this time, no devices even noticed.
In order to make this work nicely, be sure to set your dhcp assignments to expire days pr weeks in the future and not hours. Alternatively use static its for all your devices at which you can actually turn off your modem/router at night without any peripheral noticing.
Even with my clouds using dynamic ips, I had no problems. All my peripherals kept their assigned ips from the other modem/router and this router just continued its job as a router without interruptions.
I was very pleasantly surprised this time with my modem upgrade and without any troubleshooting of clouds, I went to bed early.
So there it is, another wasted post, but if you read this far, I thought you would enjoy reading about my pleasant evening rather than someone who has lost all their data.
